Silver RosesRachel Wetzsteon

Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) was a poet of seemingly effortless formal grace, moving between high and popular culture with wit and heart. This bittersweet posthumous collection is, in effect, a book of love poems, and seldom has writing on that subject been so infused with this same combination of delight, skepticism, and, in retrospect, omen. Wetzsteon was that rare writer who could lampoon with compassion, and Silver Roses shows her at the height of her powers: an American poet of endearing and lasting impact.

“The [title] poem’s placement at the end of the book, and thus of her life, makes it a painfully optimistic gesture. But it is an inspired gesture that ripples through time; it reaches back to Keats’s hand, ‘now warm and capable,’ and proffers the silver rose of love, of promise, the torch of art, to her true lover, the reader, and the readers yet to be born.”—A.E. Stallings, Poetry

“Wetzsteon left a final collection that radiates searing pain and exceptional beauty. Her poems have a pulse, and they throb with lust, desire, and a need to be heard.... Weztsteon’s poems portray a soul laid bare.”—Booklist

“[In] the poems of Rachel Wetzsteon all things matter because they have been given form, delivered to us by a sensibility that feels the weight and beauty of every moment as it passes.”—James Longenbach